5 Questions with Alice Pung
Alice Pung is an award-winning writer based in Melbourne. She is the bestselling author of the memoirs Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter, and the essay collection Close to Home, as well as the editor of the anthologies Growing Up Asian in Australia and My First Lesson.
Her first novel, Laurinda, won the Ethel Turner Prize at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. One Hundred Days is her most recent novel.
No. 1
One Hundred Days is an intimate, beautiful, and claustrophobic story of a relationship between mother and daughter. What drew you to write this story?
In this book, I wanted to explore two main questions: what is love, and what is abuse—emotional, physical and spiritual? And to what extent does culture and class affect our judgement on these matters that we perceive to be immutable? I wanted to do this through the prism of a parent-child relationship, because most people now understand that you cannot and should not control every facet of a romantic partner’s life, but legally and socially parents still control every facet of their childrens’ lives.
No.2
Can you speak on the process behind writing One Hundred Days?
While writing this book, I had three children in five years. Much of these life circumstances were not meticulously planned, but it meant in the four years it took to complete this book each word had to be tweezed into place—I no longer had the luxury of time or verbosity. A poet friend explained to me about how to think about each word of a poem as an object on a display shelf—there should be nothing there that is useless or superfluous. It has made me a more Zen writer!
No.3
You’ve chosen to narrate this story from Karuna, the daughter, to her newborn. I found this to be a really interesting and refreshing choice; it displaces an expected white audience, directing the narrative to a mixed-race child. How did you come to this narrative decision?
When I was childless and silly, I once asked my good friend what it was like to have a child who looked nothing like her—she was a fair red-head and her baby was Asian. She thought about it earnestly and replied, ‘I’ve not thought about this. To me, he’s just my baby.’ When I had my first child I suddenly understood exactly what she had meant. It’s like the line in the Gibran poem, ‘Your children come through you but not from you/And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.’
Karuna, in her youth and quest for autonomy, has not developed the possessiveness that a grown adult feels for their child, that inadvertent but sometimes harmful urge for that new human of yours to live the life you were meant to. So she speaks and writes to her child with great empathy because she understands their powerlessness.
No.4
One Hundred Days is set mostly in Victorian commission flats; I was wondering as I read it, what drew you to this place, and if your choice was impacted in light of last year’s unprecedented lockdown of Victorian commission housing?
One Hundred Days was written over four years; from the very onset it was to be set in the housing commission flats of my youth, where my aunties lived. To be trapped in those flats was the most claustrophobic scenario I could think of for a young teenager.
I certainly did not set out to write about the events of last year’s lockdown or Covid. To be honest, I am pretty tired of the glut of pandemic literature whining about how this is the worst thing that has ever happened, or how this is a dystopia come to life. To me, it is a tragedy not that people live in commission flats, but how rarely light is cast in those places—the stifling reality of an impoverished class is only brought to our attention when a pandemic happens. Then in salacious news stories, these lives are presented as an amorphous mass of victims.
I have always believed that housing flats were worthy of literature. I have taught and mentored some very wonderful children there, whose parents sent them to ballet lessons, piano lessons, art school. People in social housing have aspirations. So One Hundred Days is a homage to the slow, plodding lives of those who dream large for their future generations.
No.5
What were you listening to, or reading, or simply consuming, when you wrote One Hundred Days?
In four years I read, listened to and watched a lot of things! But I set my book in the 1980s because there was no internet then (at least not for the common person), so if you fell pregnant you really were quite isolated. Even though there was a lot of sex in popular culture (Madonna, George Michael, Prince, John Hughes films), teenagers may have been horny but they were not ‘porny’. So there’s also a sort of baffled innocence to Karuna’s sexual awakening.
No.6
And finally, one extra question I must ask: what is one book or author you wish you’d read, or been able to read, when you were growing up Asian in Australia?
Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children. I read that book last year and it blew me away. Never in a hundred years (even if I live that long) could I have written something like that! It was set exactly at the time I was a teen, and I fell in love with Sonny and Vincent and their war-scarred elders. It also broke my heart, for reasons very personal which Vivian Pham knows (because I wrote her fan mail :-)
And of course, Liminal Magazine. I think that if I had this magazine when growing up, I would not have wasted so much time poring over Miranda Kerr (as lovely as she is) in Dolly and Girlfriend and wondering why I was so lacking. I would have just felt compelled to create art, being inspired by so many artists, writers and creatives who do awesome work. Not only that but how beautiful are all your Asian Australian subjects, every single one of them.
